This course includes free access to live, hands-on labs to learn and complete tasks throughout the course.
This course is designed with two main objectives: to teach the basics of HashiCorp Consul and to arm folks with the knowledge to pass the Consul Associate exam. Although the course was designed around the (9) Consul Associate exam objectives, the course covers a wealth of Consul topics to get even the most novice person up to speed with Consul. And hey, if you're already working with Consul, you might also learn some stuff.
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This course includes free access to live, hands-on labs to learn and complete tasks throughout the course.
This course is designed with two main objectives: to teach the basics of HashiCorp Consul and to arm folks with the knowledge to pass the Consul Associate exam. Although the course was designed around the (9) Consul Associate exam objectives, the course covers a wealth of Consul topics to get even the most novice person up to speed with Consul. And hey, if you're already working with Consul, you might also learn some stuff.
This course includes free access to live, hands-on labs to learn and complete tasks throughout the course.
This course is designed with two main objectives: to teach the basics of HashiCorp Consul and to arm folks with the knowledge to pass the Consul Associate exam. Although the course was designed around the (9) Consul Associate exam objectives, the course covers a wealth of Consul topics to get even the most novice person up to speed with Consul. And hey, if you're already working with Consul, you might also learn some stuff.
Looking for information on Consul architecture, security, and protocols used? It's in here.
Struggling to understand how to write prepared queries? I've got that, too.
Were you writing a Consul agent configuration file and had problems? Yeah, I talk about that as well.
This course includes almost 70 lectures, 20+ lab sessions, and test questions for each lecture. I also include access to the slides, Mindmaps of each objective, lab guides to follow along, and tons of external links. There is even a final practice exam that includes exam-like questions to test your knowledge. Videos are available in 1080p.
If you're looking for a course to teach you how to deploy and manage a Consul environment, or if you're looking to pass the HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate, you're in the right place.
Student Feedback
"I went through almost 2 hours of your Consul course and as someone who has worked with Consul in production environments for enterprises with 15 years of IT experience, I can confidently say that this is one of the best unofficial courses on Consul.
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The production quality and the way you laid out the entire course are top-notch. So far I noticed, you didn't short change on the technical depth. I love courses that cover the technical internals in-depth as it's a productive use of my time." - Narendra V
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"Excellent course Bryan. Teaching format was great - love the labs and study guide. Slides were awesome. Most importantly this is the best consolidated course I have found on HashiCorp Consul." - Gabe M.
About HashiCorp Consul
Consul is the most downloaded tool from HashiCorp and the most widely adopted service mesh tool on AWS, so naturally, these folks who are deploying and managing it needs to understand how it all works (that's you. ). Plus, I'm sure you're interested in obtaining the HashiCorp Consul Associate certification to prove your expertise to colleagues and employers.
About the Instructor
Your instructor for this course, Bryan Krausen, is highly regarded as a HashiCorp expert. Bryan has been working with HashiCorp Consul for 4+ years and has deployed Consul for Enterprise customers. He has taught over 150,000 students, including training some of the largest companies in the US. He has several courses on HashiCorp Vault and has co-authored the book Running HashiCorp Vault in Production. Bryan holds multiple Consul certifications, including one of the first to pass the HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate certification while it was in BETA and one of only a few people in the world to hold the partner cert HashiCorp Consul Advanced.
Come join me and learn about Consul. Let's make beautiful service meshes together.
What's inside
Syllabus
In this section, students will be introduced to the instructor, the overall course, the certification exam.
This lecture will introduce students to the overall course, the training format, and discuss the objectives that students can expect to see when taking the official certification exam.
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Syllabus
This lecture will introduce students to the overall course, the training format, and discuss the objectives that students can expect to see when taking the official certification exam.
This section will introduce students to Objective 1 and the topics that we'll cover.
Let's get started and learn more about HashiCorp Consul and the use cases that it aims to provide for organizations.
In this lecture, students will learn the details of service discovery and how Consul provides this function to enable simple and efficient communication between clients and services, or between application services.
Learn more about Consul's service mesh feature, which provides service segmentation functionality.
Students will learn more about the Network Automation feature in Consul and how it's used to direct traffic to registered services
Learn more about how Consul provides a K/V store to be used for service configuration to store variable and parameters
Learn the Consul basics in this introductory lecture.
Learn more about the consensus protocol, which is a key protocol that Consul uses for Consul servers nodes.
In this lecture, students can learn more about the gossip protocol that Consul uses, which is based on Serf.
This lecture will introduce students to the networking and ports required to run Consul in your environment.
In this lecture, students will learn more about how to configure Consul for high availability to ensure the Consul service is always available.
Performance can be scaled using read-only nodes. Check it out here.
To vote or not to vote, that is the question for our Consul server nodes in this lecture.
This cool feature of Consul allows you to provision Consul across fault zones to give you even higher service availability.
Autopilot....engaged. Learn how autopilot can help ease the burden on day-to-day Consul operations.
Shewww...that was a long one. Let's quickly talk about what we discussed in this first section.
Test your knowledge of the topics discussed in this section.
Welcome to Objective 2, deploying a single datacenter.
In this lecture, students will understand how to download Consul and get the Consul agent up and running
In this session, we'll work to start Consul in dev mode and see what that looks like.
In this lection, students will understand how to manage the Consul process after it's up and running.
The Consul agent requires either -flags or a configuration file to run as expected. This lecture will go over both with a larger focus on the configuration file since it's the most popular.
This lab will walk students through a configuration file to ensure they understand how to create one for themselves. It will also provide the base configuration that we'll build on throughout the course.
In this lecture, students will learn how to configure the IP/Interface and ports that Consul will use when it's running.
Now that the Consul agent is running, how do we join server nodes to create a cluster, and how do we join clients to the cluster.
Let's recap this section and review some of the things that we've learned.
Introduction to the section
In this lection, we'll talk about what a service is and how to register one in the Consul service catalog
This section will show students how to create a service definition file and all of the components that might be needed so you can register a service.
In the first lab of this objective, we'll walk through a simple service definition and register some services with Consul.
This lecture will show students what a health check is and how to create one
Now that we have a service registered, let's update the service configuration to now include a health check that ensures that our application is up and running.
Now that we have a health check registered for our service, how do we check on the status? That's what we'll talk about during this lecture.
We can retrieve the hosts for a specific service using any Consul interface, including the UI, the CLI, and the API. That's what we'll do in this lab session.
Traditional DNS queries for a Consul service are cool, but prepared queries are where it's at. Check out this lecture and find out why.
In this lab, we'll create our first prepared query and retrieve the hosts that match the particular tags we want for a specific application version.
That was a long lesson, let's check out all the cool stuff we talked about.
This lecture will provide a brief introduction to the Consul key/value section.
In this lecture, we'll talk about general information about the Consul key/value store and what it can be used for within your organization.
Now that we have data in the Consul K/V, let's look at how we can interact with it using the API, UI, and CLI.
In this lab, we'll learn how to interact with the Consul K/V store by writing and reading data for our application.
Students can expect to learn that Consul watch is a built-in feature that we can use to monitor updates or changes to the K/V.
In this lecture, we'll learn more about what envconsul does and how we can use it for application integration with Consul.
This lab will walk students through setting up envconsul to monitor and retrieve data from the Consul K/V store and automatically set them as environment variables.
Students will learn more about consul template and how it can be used for application integration.
This lab will walk students through setting up Consul-Template to monitor and retrieve data from the Consul K/V store and create a configuration file that includes data from Consul
Let's recap some of our discussions during this section.
The Consul Security model helps operators secure the Consul datacenter and environment. This section will discuss the Consul security model and all of its components.
This lecture is an introduction to how we use Consul snapshots to back up and restore our Consul cluster.
What are snapshots and why do we need them? Students will learn this and more in this introduction to snapshots lecture.
In this lecture, we'll learn how to take snapshots and restore using our Consul snapshots.
Let's practice taking some snapshots of our cluster and inspecting the snapshot files.
This lecture will discuss what the Consul Snapshot Agent is and how we can use it to automate the creation of consistent snapshots of our Consul cluster. Keep in mind this is a Consul Enterprise feature.
In this lab session, we'll walk through the process of setting up the Consul Snapshot Agent on our cluster to take automatic snapshots of our cluster and store them in Amazon S3. Personally, I REALLY wish I had this demo available when I started to work with the Consul Snapshot Agent.
Let's recap some of the topics that we discussed in this section.
Welcome to Consul Service Mesh, where students will learn what service mesh is in much greater detail.
Consul Service Mesh has lots of moving parts, and students can expect to go much deeper into each of these and see how all the components work together to provide a holistic solution.
Ok, so now that we know the components of service mesh, how do we register a service proxy for our Consul services?
Allow or Deny? We'll discuss how intentions can be used to permit or deny communication between our services.
Ok, intentions are awesome, but how do we create them? Let's see how to use all three Consul interfaces to create intentions.
Oh man, I was so excited to get this lab recorded and working, because it showcases so many awesome features of Consul service mesh.
Let's recap what we learned in this section.
What the heck is the Consul security/threat model and why should I care?
Setting up the different components of the security model is key to deploying a secure Consul cluster. Learn more about the different TLS certificates that Consul needs for a secure environment.
Being that Consul is so flexible, even things like TLS encryption offers different ways to secure your cluster.
What did we learn in this section? Let's recap and find out.
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Reviews summary
Consul associate cert prep & labs
Provides a broad overview of Consul features.
Aims to prepare for the Consul Associate exam.
Includes a final exam simulation.
Offers live, practical lab sessions.
Activities
Review Networking Fundamentals
Show steps
Reviewing networking fundamentals will provide a solid foundation for understanding Consul's service discovery and mesh capabilities.
Browse courses on
Networking Fundamentals
Show steps
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Review the OSI model and TCP/IP stack.
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Study common network protocols like HTTP, DNS, and gRPC.
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Practice subnetting and CIDR notation.
Read 'HashiCorp Consul: Up and Running'
Show steps
Reading this book will provide a deeper understanding of Consul concepts and best practices.
View
Putting Knowledge to Work
on Amazon
Show steps
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Read the book cover to cover.
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Take notes on key concepts and examples.
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Try out the examples in a lab environment.
Practice Consul CLI Commands
Show steps
Practicing Consul CLI commands will improve your proficiency in managing and interacting with Consul.
Show steps
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Review the Consul CLI documentation.
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Practice common commands like 'consul members', 'consul kv', and 'consul catalog'.
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Experiment with different flags and options.
Four other activities
Expand to see all activities and additional details
Show all seven activities
Deploy a Consul Cluster in a Cloud Environment
Show steps
Deploying a Consul cluster in a cloud environment will provide hands-on experience with Consul deployment and configuration.
Show steps
-
Choose a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP).
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Provision virtual machines or containers.
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Install and configure Consul on each node.
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Configure Consul for high availability.
Write a Blog Post on Consul Service Mesh
Show steps
Writing a blog post on Consul service mesh will solidify your understanding of its features and benefits.
Show steps
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Research Consul service mesh concepts.
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Outline the key features and benefits.
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Write a clear and concise blog post.
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Include examples and diagrams.
Read 'Mastering Consul'
Show steps
Reading this book will help you master advanced Consul concepts and techniques.
View
Putting Knowledge to Work
on Amazon
Show steps
-
Read the book carefully.
-
Experiment with the advanced features.
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Apply the techniques to real-world scenarios.
Contribute to a Consul Open Source Project
Show steps
Contributing to a Consul open source project will provide valuable experience with Consul development and community engagement.
Show steps
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Find a Consul open source project on GitHub.
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Identify a bug or feature to work on.
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Submit a pull request with your changes.
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Participate in code reviews.
Review Networking Fundamentals
Show steps
Reviewing networking fundamentals will provide a solid foundation for understanding Consul's service discovery and mesh capabilities.
Browse courses on
Networking Fundamentals
Show steps
- Review the OSI model and TCP/IP stack.
- Study common network protocols like HTTP, DNS, and gRPC.
- Practice subnetting and CIDR notation.
Read 'HashiCorp Consul: Up and Running'
Show steps
Reading this book will provide a deeper understanding of Consul concepts and best practices.
View
Putting Knowledge to Work
on Amazon
Show steps
- Read the book cover to cover.
- Take notes on key concepts and examples.
- Try out the examples in a lab environment.
Practice Consul CLI Commands
Show steps
Practicing Consul CLI commands will improve your proficiency in managing and interacting with Consul.
Show steps
- Review the Consul CLI documentation.
- Practice common commands like 'consul members', 'consul kv', and 'consul catalog'.
- Experiment with different flags and options.
Deploy a Consul Cluster in a Cloud Environment
Show steps
Deploying a Consul cluster in a cloud environment will provide hands-on experience with Consul deployment and configuration.
Show steps
- Choose a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Provision virtual machines or containers.
- Install and configure Consul on each node.
- Configure Consul for high availability.
Write a Blog Post on Consul Service Mesh
Show steps
Writing a blog post on Consul service mesh will solidify your understanding of its features and benefits.
Show steps
- Research Consul service mesh concepts.
- Outline the key features and benefits.
- Write a clear and concise blog post.
- Include examples and diagrams.
Read 'Mastering Consul'
Show steps
Reading this book will help you master advanced Consul concepts and techniques.
View
Putting Knowledge to Work
on Amazon
Show steps
- Read the book carefully.
- Experiment with the advanced features.
- Apply the techniques to real-world scenarios.
Contribute to a Consul Open Source Project
Show steps
Contributing to a Consul open source project will provide valuable experience with Consul development and community engagement.
Show steps
- Find a Consul open source project on GitHub.
- Identify a bug or feature to work on.
- Submit a pull request with your changes.
- Participate in code reviews.
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